As part of the institutional changes needed to combat terrorism, our government has announced the setting up of a new federal investigating agency. This is fundamentally a good move. Criminals and terrorists do not respect state borders. Veerappan was able to operate for so long because he moved back and forth between states cleverly taking advantage of the lack of coordination between state bureaucracies. State governments have under-invested in police forces. Expenditure for the police has been classified by our mandarins as a “non-plan” expense. Whenever there are fiscal shortfalls, as is always the case for every state, police budgets get slashed. We have far fewer police personnel as a proportion of our population than we did 60 years ago and our numbers are proportionately far lower than most other countries. Our police is underpaid (exposing them to the temptations of corruption) and under-equipped. We have no data bases worth talking about. If you commit a crime in one neighbourhood and move to the next one, you can easily disappear. The police stations do not communicate in real time and there is no integrated data base. We now know (tragically!) how poorly armed and protected our police force is. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Our police procedures are trapped in 19th-century colonial straitjackets. Criminals and terrorists operate in the 21st-century world with aplomb. An efficient, modern, well-funded federal agency is certainly worthwhile.

However, we run the risk of adding one more agency to the laundry list of the CBI, the IB and the RAW, with endless turf battles and bureaucratic wrangling. We also run the risk of state police forces not working in coordination with the federal agency, sowing the seeds of gridlock. Many state governments are apprehensive of a new agency. Given the alleged misuse of agencies like the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate to target political opponents, such fears are not misplaced. It is therefore of the greatest importance that we get the eco-system around the new agency right. Otherwise down the road having wasted crores of rupees we may end up worse off than where we are today.

... contd.